Professor Dr. Michael Stolz
Alfried Krupp Senior Fellow
(October 2021 - September 2022)
Has read German, French and Italian languages and literatures at the universities of Munich (LMU), Poitiers and Bern
Assistant lecturer in medieval German studies at the university of Bern (1988–1995, 1998–2001), visiting fellow at the European Humanities Research Centre of the university of Oxford (1995–1998), assistant professor in medieval German studies at the university of Basel (2001–2005), professor in medieval German studies at the university of Göttingen (2005/6) and at the university of Bern (since 2006), professeur invité at the university of Paris IV-Sorbonne (2007/8), FRIAS fellow at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies, university of Freiburg i.Br. (2014), visiting scholar at the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages, Stanford University (2015)
- Professor in medieval German studies at the university of Bern (since 2006)
Fellow project: Poetics of Visuality in Wolfram's ›Parzival‹. Materiality and interculturality
In recent decades the poetics of the visual has attracted increased scholarly interest in historical studies; but so far, the topic has rarely been considered in intercultural perspectives. A revealing example of this is Wolfram von Eschenbach’s medieval poem Parzival, composed shortly after 1200, that suggests that his author was familiar with the Arab learning of his time, as transmitted through the Iberian translation centre of Toledo. The metaphorical language of the poem evokes contrasts of light and darkness, the phenomenon of haziness and the play of colours. So far, there has been no attempt to relate these motifs to contemporary Arab optics. Influential thinkers such as Alhacen (Ibn al-Haytham) or the Andalusian poet Ibn Hazm studied the radiation of light, the quality of darkness, and the effects of colours. As Wolfram's Parzival ‘reflects’ elementary components of these phenomena, the project analyses relevant episodes of the poem (including textual variants occurring in the manuscript transmission) and confronts them with statements in Arab science.